Mothers Without Borders

My mother, Sandra, is tiny but fierce, 5 feet and 100 pounds of red hair, wry humor, and steely will — like Nietzsche wrapped in Susan Sarandon. She was living in Switzerland when she was hit by a car, fracturing both legs, and was still recovering as my first pregnancy took a tragic turn. One of my twins, a boy we’d named Ames, died in utero, and I was put on bed rest to stave off pre-term labor and save his sister. (It was not our best winter.) Though wheelchair-bound and unable to fly, my mother wasn’t about to let 4,500 miles keep her from coming to my aid. While I lay on my couch at home in St. Paul, Minn., and later in a hospital bed, she orchestrated a relief effort that provided by proxy the comfort she couldn’t give in person — a rotating crop of friends and family to keep me in companionship, distraction, and food.

I gave birth to my daughter, Simone, on Feb. 8, 2008 — 15 weeks early. She weighed 1 lb, 11 oz, with fingers as slender as the tines of a salad fork. As I kept vigil in the neonatal intensive-care unit, my mother and I exchanged a near-constant stream of e-mail messages. Hers were filled with solace, worry, and admonishments to eat. And each evening one of her henchmen would appear at the hospital with dinner for me and my husband.

I was grateful for her transatlantic ministrations, and now I understood them in a way I hadn’t before. Like me, she was watching her daughter endure pain she’d have done anything to alleviate. Her maternal instinct was frustrated by distance; mine by the plexiglass of the incubator separating me from my child. Simone lay covered in wires and was often too fragile to be touched for more than a moment. On the worst days, I stood by helplessly as alarms sounded and my tiny baby arched her back in distress.

I clung to what little I could do. I cupped Simone’s feet through the doors of her incubator. I read to her; I sang. I pumped every few hours, grimly satisfied by the knowledge that though she was fed through a tube, it was my milk doing the nourishing, and I knew the relief it must have given my mother to take care of my meals.

I learned early on what all parents come to know: We face barriers in caring for our children. You can’t always be at the playground to stop a fall, or keep them from discovering that not everybody likes them. If all goes well, your kids will grow up and move out, phone calls will dwindle for a while, and parenting will be done via e-mail and care packages. We work with the openings we have, whether they’re holiday visits or portholes in an incubator.

And in the end, most barriers are rendered irrelevant. By July, Simone had been home for six weeks, slender tubes from her nose to an oxygen tank her only remaining tethers. My mother was visiting, and she’d climbed the three flights to my apartment without a crutch. That afternoon, almost six months to the day after I’d dialed to tell her of Ames’ death, she was with me for another call — from a nurse, with test results showing my daughter was ready to breathe on her own. I burst into tears and grabbed for the tubes encircling Simone’s cheeks, and my mother helped remove the tape securing them. We gaped at my baby’s face, fully visible for the first time.

“Free! Free at last!” we whooped as my mother swung Simone into her arms. The three of us danced through the halls, without wires or plexiglass or oceans between us, put back together so neatly you’d never guess we’d been broken at all.

AMG/Parade Digital

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